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The Tack Piano

We have the sound nailed

With a more percussive sound it’s often used to evoke the feeling of a honky-tonk, associated with ragtime pieces in old Hollywood Western movies. This is the most comprehensive tack piano library ever created.

The Tack Piano

Overview

Everybody loves the sound of the good old Mrs Mills piano from Abbey Road Studios.

I remember hearing “In the Lost and Found” by Elliott Smith for the first time and falling in love immediately with the sound of a tack piano. I was obsessed to get the same sound and make a sample library, that was when I released W-Honky back in 2010. It was a basic upright piano mixed with a synthesized waveform to get the metal pluck. No round robins, no velocity layers, no release samples were present in W-Honky. So, in 2015 I released the first version of The Tack which included release samples, round robin and built-in effects.

And today we release a new version of The Tack.

The Tack Piano is completely re-sampled from scratch, it sounds better than ever and is now a completely authentic tack piano featuring a new GUI with top-notch features that makes it unbeatable and a dream come true for tack piano fans like myself. Equally at home in music, sound design or FX, the Tack Piano is like no other and a must-have addition to your piano collection.

Video – In action

Mixer

The Tack Piano features a full mixer with which you can control the three mic positions separately:

Close: recorded with two Neumann KM184 placed right above the hammers.

Mid: recorded with two Sennheiser 421 placed below the keys at a mid distance.

Far: recorded with two spaced Neumann TLM 103 at the back of the room.

Mix: combination of the three mic positions in a single file in order to save RAM.

With a load/purge switch for each channel, pan, volume, mute/solo, stereo width from 100% stereo to mono and output selector for mixing the different channels on your DAW.

Effects

The library features our advanced effect script already implemented in Legacy Drums and some freebies. This script lets you insert any effect in any of the 8 available slots, including:

High Quality EQ.

Various types of compressors.

Modulation: chorus, flanger, phaser.

Distortion / Saturation / Tape

Algorithmic and convolutional reverb with more than 40 custom impulse responses.

Amp simulators.

More.

This script boosts exponentially the sonic capabilities of the library, easy to use in a simple and elegant design.

Settings

From the settings page you can control basically any parameter you might ever need. Divided in four section you can find:

Round robin: the piano was sampled with 2 true round robin repetitions, you can select the number you want here plus a neighbour borrowing option for extra repetitions using scripted round robin.

Velocity curve: control how the library reacts to incoming midi notes.

Noises: control the volume of the non-tonal parts of the piano. Release sample volume, key on and key off samples and pedal noises (sustain, soft pedal and sostenuto).

Testimonials

As someone who made my own real tack piano and also spent a lot of time on the Mrs. Mills piano at Abbey Road, The Tack Piano sounds incredible and will get a lot of use when I’m away from my real one. Wavesfactory nailed the sound of a great tack piano.

Greg Wells – Adele / Katy Perry / Mika

If you’ve ever wanted a keyboard sound that bridges the realms of acoustic and electric, can take you from the honky tonk saloons to the weird and haunted places of hammer horror, gothic fairy tales (and more!) then you definitely need Wavesfactory’s ‘The Tack’ in your life!

Stephen Gallagher – District 9 / The Hobbit

Wavesfactory have crafted a quality bit of sound design with The Tack. An instrument that expertly captures all the conventional detail music makers would expect of a tack piano, while also providing a full range of nuanced parameters which allow unconventional sound manipulation at the same time. A beautiful piece of work for any composer or producer!

Julian Kindred – Ellie Goulding / Aimee Mann / Hammock / Nao

Specs

Content

Size:

14.22 GB

Samples:

9,118

Mic positions:

3 + mixdown

Velocity layers:

8

Round robin:

2. Up to 6 with neighbour borrowing

Works with:

Kontakt 5.5.2 – Full version required. Kontakt Player will run in demo mode.

User Manual:

Audio demos

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